The City Jungle (6 page)

“Raw?”

“I don't understand.”

“I mean, was the meat uncooked?” asked Marina.

“Of course,” the assistant protested solemnly.

In spite of her despondent mood, Marina could not restrain a smile. “That explains everything! You forget,” she said, not without a trace of irony, “that this wolf is a savage beast only in the eyes of the law. I have everything necessary with me.”

A loud wailing reached her ears, a mournful plaint that died out in a low whimper. She turned a corner of the walk and saw the cage in the distance. The captive was sitting in the middle, howling out his unhappiness, his head pointed at the sky.

“Wolf!” cried Marina. “Wolf!” She was going to call, “Come here!” But she bit her lip.

Wolf's ears flew up at the first call. At the second he sprang to his feet as if touched by a live wire.

“Wolf!” Marina called again.

Then he saw her, saw her coming nearer. He threw himself against the bars, rejoicing with a deep, ringing bark that broke into a high note. He wagged his tail madly, contorting his body in an ecstasy of bliss, rolling his eyes, laughing and crying at once. And every gurgling, howling, jubilant bark, every movement, every contortion said but one thing—“At last, at last, you have come!”

Marina turned to her chauffeur who was following her. “Let me have it.” He was holding a tray.

“The food?”

“Of course.”

“Don't you give it to him, please,” said the assistant. “Let the keeper feed him.” He replied to Marina's inquiring glance with, “He must get to trust him.”

Meanwhile the wolf was standing pressed against the bars of his cage, singing his gentle impatience in high, long-drawn cadences.

The keeper took the two dishes.

“What do they contain?” asked the assistant and raised the cover curiously.

“Milk,” said Marina with a laugh, “milk in one, and boiled rice with a little meat and marrow bones in the other.”

The assistant managed a feeble smile. “Do you call that food for a wolf? We certainly never thought of that. We'd have a hard time providing him with that every day.”

They finally decided that Marina should pay for the food.

Then she was permitted to enter the narrow enclosure that separated visitors from the bars of the cage. She stretched both hands between the bars. Wolf stood on his hindlegs, and managed to put his forepaws on her shoulders. He tried to reach her face with his lapping tongue. Marina held his head firmly.

“Be brave, old fellow,” she said. “Resign yourself as I've resigned myself. Be brave, be patient, it is only half as bad as death.”

The keeper pushed the dishes into the cage, cautiously, as one gives food to wild animals.

Marina pushed the wolf away from her gently. “Eat,” she begged, “eat your food!”

Famished, the wolf leaped on his rice, but he kept careful watch and when Marina took a step away from the bars or merely moved, he rushed over to her.

People had gathered and were staring curiously.

Marina waited until Wolf had eaten everything. He came and stood by her. She scratched his head between his ears. “Be brave,” she whispered, “goodbye, I'll come again!”

As she released herself from him, he began to howl. She turned to him at once. “Be still, Wolf,” she commanded. “Take care of this!” She threw him another glove. “Take good care of it!”

The wolf lay down and put his head on the glove, with intense gravity, duty-bound, and was silent.

Marina left. The wall of people cut her off immediately from his view.

Chapter Eight

Homecoming

M
IBBEL LAY STRETCHED OUT peaceably in his cage. He was lying on his left side, blinking indifferently out into the zoo where human faces loitered at the bars or sauntered past. Sometimes Mibbel fell asleep, sometimes he woke up, or was awakened by a human voice, a call, or by moaning roars from one of his kinsfolk in the neighboring cages. Then he would long for Hella, his mate.

When would he see her again, nestling awake or asleep against her soft warm flanks? Why did they keep him from her? He was happy in her company, and would certainly not harm his little sons.

That Hella had two little sons he had heard some time before from Vasta, the mouse.

Why did they separate him from his own kin? He could not understand it at all. Nor did he understand those two-legged creatures in whose power his whole life had been spent.

His thoughts had so often followed this closed ­circle, a hundred times a day, and they were following it again as he lay there. Everything grew a little hazy, and he fell asleep.

Vasta had been there the first thing that morning to tell him the news.

In the winter cage, she reported, there was a big box with something alive in it. They had just brought it in.

Mibbel recollected that he had heard all kinds of noises behind the partition that divided the summer from the winter cage. But he felt no curiosity either then or upon hearing Vasta's story. He no longer gave it a thought.

But he bounded into the air when the trapdoor rattled behind him, and Brosso trotted leisurely in.

An imposing and terrifying sight was Brosso.

He had a huge flowing mane the dark brown locks of which were tinged with black. His head was held high, his proud and handsome face was distorted and horribly disfigured. In place of his right eye there was a big bloody gash, and the tears that constantly trickled down from it had wet the fine thick hairs on his face far down his cheek, so that they were black and clotted with blood and seemed to exaggerate his injury. The eye itself was closed. But at long intervals the lids would disclose a narrow slit, between which the amber-yellow pupils gleamed.

Brosso walked slowly with the superior mien of the king of beasts. Yet the way in which he set down his feet was full of unutterably impotent sorrow. His gait lacked a lion's springy grace, his joints seemed worn out, his muscles languid and all but flabby.

Brosso wandered once around the cage, his head held high as when he came in. He made the same round a second time, his head lowered, his nose thrust forward, sniffing and investigating his new quarters. Then he stopped in the middle, lashing his flanks feebly with the tassel of his tail and muttering as if he were quite alone, “What next? What next?”

Mibbel had sinuously avoided Brosso as he paraded the cage, but he never took his eyes off him. Overwhelmed and frightened, at first by Brosso's august appearance, then by distrust and secret anxiety, he prepared to defend himself. But in the end he took a sudden liking to Brosso.

Presently Mibbel advanced with the rolling gait of playfulness, and, lifting his paw, tapped Brosso in fun on the shoulder.

“Stop that,” growled Brosso in a tone of command, but without turning his head. Mibbel bounded timidly back.

“Stop it,” repeated Brosso more gently.

Mibbel threw himself full length on the floor. “Where did you come from?” he purred.

For a long time there was no answer. At last Brosso deigned to reply, but it sounded as if he were talking to himself. “I am sick. Very sick, indeed. Or is it rest that I need? Yes, yes, rest, rest, rest!” He peered intently into the zoological garden, turning his majestic head to the right and left, while the golden pupil of his right eye flashed as he stared around the cage. “How can it be? I must have been here before. Remarkable! Long ago, very long ago! But I must certainly have been here!”

“I've lived here ever since I was born,” said Mibbel, “and I never set eyes on you before.”

Brosso's lips twitched scornfully. “Since you were born! Indeed! A young cub like you. . . .”

Mibbel crept closer. “What's the matter with your eye?”

“I should have known it,” muttered Brosso. “After all that time I should have known. And I did know it, but . . .”

“You knew what?” asked Mibbel.

“That it was useless,” Brosso snorted. “But one always wants to, oh, how dreadfully one wants to. In the end I could think of nothing else. Waking or sleeping, it was always on my mind. At last one can hesitate no longer, one acts whether it means death or not. . . .”

“I don't understand,” Mibbel interrupted.

“I leaped at him three times,” Brosso continued, “three times, and each time his whip caught me in the eye. Each time, three times, one after the other. . . .”

“I don't understand you at all,” Mibbel repeated.

“Didn't they drive you through a long tunnel?” asked Brosso.

“What for?”

“Into an enormously big barred room?”

Mibbel looked his astonishment.

“Sometimes hundreds of those two-legged beasts are sitting outside in a circle. At other times it is all empty. . . .”

“Go on!” urged Mibbel.

“You've never been through it?” asked Brosso.

Mibbel shook his head. “I don't understand you.”

With a discreet stroke of his paw Brosso rubbed his injured eye and cheek. “It hardly bothers me,” he said, “but I have difficulty in seeing. Not that it makes any difference! That two-legged beast! If I had caught him . . . But the whip cut so terribly! It was impos­sible. But if I had caught him!” He lowered his head and roared. It was so thunderous, so wrathful, and Brosso roared so long, that presently the other lions, tigers and panthers began too.

Mibbel sprang to his feet, and standing beside Brosso, with his head lowered, roared too with might and main.

But there was no rage in his roar, nor in the roaring of the others—merely grumbling and noise. In Brosso's roar alone was that vengeful white-hot anger, the result of his bitter experience. His roars resounded with primal power above those of all the rest.

Suddenly Mibbel stopped roaring, and pushing ­Brosso's side gently with his forehead, whispered, “You're out of your mind!”

Mibbel noticed with pity that Brosso swayed at the slight push. He observed also that his new companion had lost a lower fang.

Gradually Brosso quieted down. He had to stretch out on the floor.

“Have you never had to hop up on a narrow little thing,” he asked after a pause, “where there's no room to sit, much less to stand?”

“Never!” Mibbel declared solemnly.

“And yet you have to sit and stand. Then the hoops! Sometimes they're burning, sometimes they're covered with paper. But in any case you have to jump through. Through the hoop—it cuts of course. Or through the fire. That singes your hair and makes it smell.”

A shudder passed over his back and flanks. He was trembling with indignation.

“I can't imagine why the two-legged beasts are so crazy about such things, or why they torment us so. They have their dogs to do such tricks! That tribe even enjoys doing them. I can't understand that either!”

Mibbel sat quite perplexed. “I have never heard of such things before,” he said shyly.

Brosso stared at him. “No? That's good news to me. Perhaps I'll find some rest here at last. And it certainly does you no harm to hear them. Who knows but they may be coming for you tomorrow?”

He pricked up his ears and his tail began to beat the floor. “They're coming now,” he growled.

With a supple cowering spring, Mibbel fled to the farthest corner and lay down, pressing himself in mortal fear against the wall.

The curator, an assistant and a keeper appeared. Not to fetch Mibbel, however. They needed him for breeding purposes and had no thought of selling him to a circus. They merely wanted to examine the old lion.

“Hello, old fellow,” called the curator, “do you still know me, eh?”

But Brosso did not recognize him. He had traveled about the world for twelve years with the circus. He had a hazy recollection of the zoological garden, but of nothing else. Those twelve years had changed a feeling of indifference and strangeness toward humankind into a feeling of bitter hatred.

He lashed his tail wildly, snarling furiously at the three men as he trotted back and forth, pushing with his head against the bars.

The curator watched him for a while.

“Shall we call a doctor?” asked the assistant. “His eye seems in a bad way.”

“Let it be,” the curator decided. “The eye will either heal of itself or he'll lose it. It makes no difference. I don't want to torment the old fellow any further. See how nervous he is.”

“Perhaps it is the pain that excites him,” the assistant suggested.

“No,” said the curator, and the keeper smiled agreement. “His pain is from quite a different cause. He is weighed down by the memory of the circus years, the hard, hard years!” He turned to the lion. “They certainly gave you wonderful treatment. Well, I'll give you your old age pension. God knows you've earned it.”

As if in answer Brosso roared, a single short moaning roar.

“Yes, yes, I know all about it,” the curator pacified him. “All I need do is look at you, and I know enough! There, there, it's all right now, old boy.” The curator continued to speak softly to the lion who seemed to grow more and more furious. “But don't do anything to my Jackie!” The curator meant Mibbel whom he noticed in the background, anxiously pressed against the wall. “Do you understand? He's not to blame, and can't help your bad temper.”

Brosso never stopped pushing his mighty head to the right and left against the bars with angry growls and snarls.

“Let us go,” said the curator. “Listen, Gruber,” he added to the keeper, “see that the old fellow gets good soft meat, few bones and only such as he can chew up. You'll notice he's lost a fang. He's really in pretty bad shape. But patience, patience! No rough work, I know you understand! He's been beaten enough.”

“But everybody says that wild animals are no longer mistreated in training.” The assistant remarked.

“Very likely,” replied the curator. “That is undoubtedly the truth. But there are wild animals and wild animals. Some are tractable, some obstinate, some gentle, some incorrigible. Some become almost tame, almost! Others never will be. What is a manager to do who has paid a high price for such an animal? The trainer drives it perfectly frantic. For after all, a real trainer is a rare phenomenon. The usual type must simply content himself with browbeating the refractory animal more than the others. . . .”

“Of course,” said the assistant, “but browbeating and mistreating are different matters.”

“You don't say!” laughed the curator and pointed to Brosso's cage. “You'd better ask the old veteran in there what his opinion is. If he could but talk, he would unfold a tale of pointed iron prods, whips and blank cartridges. He's had his fair share.”

They were leaving the cage in the distance.

“For the rest,” added the curator, “the old fellow owes the simple fact that he's still alive to his shrewdness or his cowardice—or both.”